Investment Insights – Seth Damski

Seth Damski:
We see our role as slightly different than what you’re describing. We’re not trying to be the smartest guys in the room. We’re trying to work with investors who are pretty damn deliberate about what they want. We want to play a screening function to go out and find the investment managers who fulfill those criteria. So if we’re really doing our job right, you know, we’ve gotten to know our investors, you know, really well. Often over the course of years, if not decades. We do that with, you know, a variety of really good relationship builders on the platform at Old City.

Dana Robinson:
Exit Plan is a podcast for business owners and those who want to be business owners. I’m always in search of the lesser known stories of entrepreneurship in the Exit Plan podcast. You’ll hear stories from startup to sale and hear from the professionals who helped business owners achieve their exit. Hosted by me, author and private equity manager Dana Robinson. Along with my co hosts and guests, you’ll hear real stories, tips and tools that will help you plan for the exit you want, whether you are still working at a day job or running a business. Let’s get started with this episode of the Exit Plan podcast.

Dana Robinson:
Hey everybody, it’s Dana Robinson coming at you with the Exit Plan podcast. In today’s episode, I have Seth Damsky. He’s a principal at Old City Investment Partners. And I’m going to use today as an opportunity to teach my listeners a little bit about the sort of private equity and private capital world. Seth’s specialty is something that most people probably never heard of. He’s a placement agent that raises money for unique niche sponsor and managed funds. So, Seth, thanks for coming on.

Seth Damski:
Thanks for having me, Dana.

Dana Robinson:
I love having the two edged sword of someone who’s an industry expert that has something that they can teach me and that we as sort of the Exit Plan crowd, the listener can learn something about private equity, you know, that’s going to help people who are raising money understand what we are all doing back here behind the scenes. So I want to get some insights from you, but you, you run a business and so my, my first, you know, question when I meet another entrepreneur is like, how’d you get into this business? And then talk me through the journey. I think anyone who’s a, you know, a person running a business wants to know how’d you go from A to Z, from one person and, and to a partnership, to a group, to a firm. So can you share with me the the Old City Journey?

Seth Damski:
Absolutely. Love to. Yeah. So we do something that is somewhat straightforward. We find we look for, we find very talented, often young, not always so young, but often young investment managers. And we evaluate them to make sure that they have real expertise and that they have a real infrastructure to be a proper fiduciary. And we introduce them to investors, many of whom we’ve known for many years. Some investors we, you know, continue to still meet.

Seth Damski:
And we play a function of raising capital for a fund manager who’s typically a better investor than they are a marketer of their investment services.

Dana Robinson:
Right.

Seth Damski:
So it’s pretty straightforward. We’re an introducer of high quality investment management to savvy investors. And for many years that was pretty straightforward. As we’ve grown, and we’ve grown, both in terms of the asset scale that we’re raising for our clients and also the employees and other affiliates that we have at Old City, it became quite apparent quite quickly that we needed to build an infrastructure of our own to do what we’re doing. Though it might be simple, it’s not so simple to do it right and to scale it. When it comes to folks that, that are not me. When we started out, it was sort of me doing everything, and that’s a lot of work. But it’s also somewhat simple because, you know, you don’t have to define your processes so clearly.

Seth Damski:
As we’ve grown and right now we have about 18 employees, but then a network of independent placement folks who utilize Old Cities to be their broker, dealer. So we sort of punch above our weight. We have a distributed sales force, a syndicate, if you will, of close to 100 fundraising professionals. And that’s a great thing. But organizing, you know, that, that sort of herd of cats can, can be quite tricky, especially since our business is so much one of running on trust, you know, making sure that you’re maintaining the personal relationships with all of your constituencies in a very meaningful and authentic way. You know, it really helps to sort of grease the wheels and make that mousetrap work.

Dana Robinson:
Yeah. Let me, just for the sake of the audience, let me see if I can help describe the ecosystem because a lot of people who own businesses, running businesses, have this idea that maybe someday they’ll sell the private equity or that maybe they can get growth capital from private equity and they’ve heard the word, you know, fund manager, maybe investment manager, and maybe not everybody quite understands what we’re doing. So I’m going to take the moment out of your story. We’ll come back to talk about Old City and where you’ve grown to and what you’re doing and get More specific. But the, in the world we’re in, as you say, often young investment professionals have an expertise in something. For some of them, you know, it’s very sophisticated trading for, for others, it might be understanding a particular type of business and, and making investments in a particular type of business that they know very, very well. Maybe they’ve worked for a large fund and kind of cut their teeth on some things that gave them some expertise. So then they say, you know, we’re an expert in this thing.

Dana Robinson:
And they, they need to raise money to go execute an investment strategy, whether that’s to put growth capital into businesses or to buy entire businesses to buy, to have controlled buyouts. And, and those, those people become a fiduciary if they form a fund and, and then they become the investment manager that advises the fund and they, they get their fees and a carried interest for doing that. But it’s very difficult for the same person that has that particular expertise to also go around. I heard it phrased this way, Seth, at an event last year, shaking the tin cup. Yeah, I, I overheard a, a private equity manager at a conference last summer and he said, oh, you know, I’m out in Dallas shaking the tin cup. So, but it really is, it’s a lot of work. You know, our fund has a, an investor relations partner who, you know, gives us a resource for fundraising. But even with, you know, full time partner that’s dedicated to that, you know, placement agents have a, you know, a place where they say, hey, we’re, we’re good at vetting you and people might not, institutions might not invest in you unless they’ve been screened.

Dana Robinson:
And so you’ve gained some expertise in how to figure out. Are these the kind of managers that we know that we’re reducing our investors risk with? Right. You’re gonna, you’re gonna charge something for what you’re doing and to do that you’re bringing some value, I suppose, by being sure that the investment managers you’re investing in are the right places. So you’re de. Risking your investors there and then also trying to figure out what’s the risk that your investors are chasing. Right. What is the particular type of alternative that they want exposure to and then matching that up with their risk tolerance. Right.

Seth Damski:
Yeah.

Dana Robinson:
So in that world, you know, the easiest way to say it is that if you’re Dana with a fund, you’re a guy I go to and say, I need to raise money for the fund. Find people who like landscape maintenance or you know, business services and, and bring them to Me and you. Then you’d vet our organization and say, is this investable for the, for the investors that we have in our cadre of investors? And then, and then you go shop that investment to the investors and help us raise a fund that we use to execute our investment strategy. Right.

Seth Damski:
I actually do have investors who are interested in landscape roll up, so we could talk about that offline. But yeah, that’s, that’s accurate. We see our role as slightly different than what you’re describing our goal. Even though we, you know, put a lot of time and effort into being smart and we’ve hired some wonderful partners on board at Old City to be smart. We’re not trying to be the smartest guys in the room. We’re trying to work with investors who are pretty damn deliberate about what they want. And we want to play a screening function to go out and find the investment managers who fulfill those criteria. So if we’re really doing our job right, we’ve gotten to know our investors really well, often over the course of years, if not decades.

Seth Damski:
And we do that with a variety of really good relationship builders on the platform at Old City, such that when we find an investment solution, an investment manager that really has their act together, it doesn’t seem like we’re doing much convincing at all. We’ve done proper diligence so that our investors know that if they continue to like what they see and move down the road, they’re not going to come up with any surprises. There’s not going to be an 11th hour. Oops, you know, maybe this, the background check on one of these principles wasn’t so clean. They know they can rely that things are kosher, but we’re not really trying to sort of persuade anybody of anything. We’re trying to bring the, you know, the good, the bad, the ugly in, up in an efficient way and keep folks focused on, on the good things we found, if that makes sense.

Dana Robinson:
Yeah, I love that. And you were telling me earlier offline that the. You have sort of landed in some niche sort of categories. I mean, I have, you know, some contacts that are agnostic, you know, industry agnostic, placement agents, and there are a couple of big shops that you’re probably aware of and that in that space, what, what have you. Let’s get back to your business and how it’s grown, you know, how, what’s it doing and how did you end up kind of finding your what, what I’ll call your niche?

Seth Damski:
Yeah, I would describe us as in our DNA, being more agnostic, but what’s happened? Thankfully, by virtue of some of the success that we’ve had in specific asset classes, we’ve become somewhat expert and we’ve gotten some somewhat of a reputation and had some incoming demand from high quality investment managers in that same asset class who want our help. So I’ll give you an example. We helped to form and raise capital for and invest our own Capital Day 1. There’s a few different legs of our business. We’re talking mostly about the asset raising side of the business, but we also manage money for one family office and thankfully myself over the course of, you know, successful career so far. We do invest capital as well, often with our clients, but sometimes more broadly than that. We were day one investors and we brought in a bunch more investors in the first fund that ever owned rail cars, freight cars within a fund structure about 10 years ago.

Dana Robinson:
Wow. Yeah, that’s very interesting that. So that had been. Was that a fragmented business of who owned those rail cars and they started a consolidation what pretty fragmented.

Seth Damski:
And the focus on rail had always been sort of from the debt side. There was a lot of debt instruments issued that were backed by rail as an asset. An entrepreneur that is a friend of mine really noticed that if you flip it on its head and focus on owning these cars as an equity ownership, owning the asset, you get a heck of a lot more reward and actually have a whole lot less risk by owning it as an equity owner. And so he created a vehicle and it was a bit of a complicated process to figure out the right structure to own that asset in. It’s not really a private equity asset, but it’s not really a liquid asset. It’s somewhere in between. There is a market where these rail cars trade quite consistently. You can rely on some degree of liquidity if you needed to get some liquidity and honor a redemption where an investor to need to redeem.

Seth Damski:
But you don’t want to ever have to be rushed into that. So there was a lot of thinking to go into what’s the right structure for a fund that owns rail cars. So we helped a lot with that thinking and we helped a lot by getting some cavalier investors who recognized the attributes of the asset class and the integrity and experience of the team running it to take some startup risk, but backed by a pretty solid asset class to invest in a first time fund as first time dollars. I mentioned to you when we were speaking offline the relationship that we are very privileged to form form with with some of our clients and investors, but clients that we commit to in the early days when it’s tough sledding, when no one’s heard about rail cars in a fund structure, and we were willing to do the evangelist and evangelizing of that. That relationship goes an awful long way when it’s now years later and that manager’s, you know, a top three portfolio of rail cars in the country and moved on to other compelling and diversifying transportation assets. But they still sort of value the relationship with Old City because we were there, you know, in the tougher days early on, the progression of our expertise and our brand in the transportation and real assets world took off from there. We ended up being a valued partner of a, you know, probably the premier transportation asset manager in the country.

Dana Robinson:
Wow.

Seth Damski:
And we were very privileged to be able to help another couple of managers get started. And they had different expertise in different areas of the transportation realm. Notably a manager that’s based down in New Orleans had a. Had an idea to put barges and tugboats and tow boats into a fund structure similar to how my friends at the railcar fund had gotten set up years before. So one thing led to another and we’ve, you know, we’ve now helped a couple of the premier transportation asset managers get their start and get their funding. And of course, we’re personally invested in both of those funds ourselves, eating our own cooking, which is a common theme for us at Old City.

Dana Robinson:
Yeah, I mean, that’s. That is, that shows that’s you’re doubling down. I mean, you’re taking some. Someone who is proving themselves for the first time. And in some of these cases, first. First fund manager plus first thesis in the industry for both of these examples. So good on you for also bringing capital into that. And I hope that, you know, has been a wise, wise investment.

Seth Damski:
I listen, if you can annualize and compound consistently at 11, 12%, you’re doing great, especially if it’s tax efficient. So. Right. We’ve done even better than that with these managers on our own capital. And thankfully we have a lot of investors who are quite pleased with us that we were able to bring them into these particular managers and achieve the same types of returns. A little bit of volatility. Some years it’s 9%, some years it’s 14. But pretty compelling income stream.

Seth Damski:
So that doesn’t come around every day. And that’s part of the challenge of our business, which is how do we find the next unicorn?

Dana Robinson:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, let me ask you that. I was going to ask. I want to ask about both sides of your, your coin. One is what do you think are some of the attributes of a great opportunity? Which includes of course, the, you know, you’re vetting the horse and the jockey. I guess. So let me ask you that and then I’m also going to ask you about what makes a great investor.

Dana Robinson:
But let’s start with finding your unicorn, finding your where, where you’re what jockey and, and what opportunity you’re going to evangelize.

Seth Damski:
Sure, there are some common themes that we always insist upon, but the way you’re asking the question, Dana, it’s funny, it’s similar. We asked the same question of ourselves recently. What is it that makes a successful salesperson at Old City? And we ended up coming up with some criteria that are not like the on paper criteria. It’s the sort of intellectual curiosity and drive to sort of get to the bottom of something. It’s a self starter mentality, hard work, absolutely necessary, but you could be a hard worker and not a self starter and, and that works in a whole lot of amazing situations. It doesn’t work so well with us at Old City as far as, you know, the successful folks that we’ve hired. I’m thinking the same way based on your question, Dana, about our managers. It’s some of those same intangibles, like the tangible stuff I have, you know, tip of my tongue, high integrity, differentiated knowledge, experience, managing through negative markets are the top three that come to mind.

Seth Damski:
And having the right infrastructure to do all that consistently. But really in terms of the question you’re asking, which is insightful, it’s an inherent aversion of risk or at least a need to be really well compensated if there is a risk of permanent loss of capital, we find that to be really consistent. And folks who are just willing to be meticulous and go the extra mile or two or three in order to ensure that all the risks are known and all the risks that can be filtered out are filtered out such that the investment prognosis is one of how much upside am I expecting here and.

Dana Robinson:
How much return I want to. We’re talking about the quality of a manager that, you know, I think the risk aversion is an interesting one because the, you know, we’re on fund one and the three of the four partners in the fund are entrepreneurial by sort of experience and you know, have some track record, have had successes, have lived through failures and, and those are all good de riskers for our clients because then we’re not, we’re not idiots. We’re bringing all of the culmination of Our, you know, experience in business into our role as managers, but we do lean toward opportunity and, and that plays well at the bottom of the lower middle market where, where gut and instinct matter more than whether your spreadsheet and your models, you know, are, are perfectly sharpened. But I mean, the, like, let’s just take your investment in the rail car. That was an entrepreneurial decision. But you, you know, that’s a, this sounds like a very big bet. This is, this is not a tiny fund or a small opportunity. So you take a manager there and you really want to say is, is this the kind of person that is going to thoroughly de risk this investment so that we are not looking over our shoulder and that, you know, we, so when you have that analysis, how do you, how do you ensure that you’ve got either an entrepreneur that’s been disciplined by their past experiences enough to, to be diligent, because a lot of entrepreneurs are not.

Dana Robinson:
And, and being a, able to be creative the way you want an entrepreneur to be, to say, like there’s an opportunity. No one’s ever done this before. I mean, this is originating an idea that, that takes that entrepreneur. But you need them for the sake of your investors and your money to be classic big fund de riskers. Right.

Seth Damski:
Yeah. Let me start the answer with just the positioning of where we sit. When and when we come to a savvy investor and they’re getting knocks on the door all day, every day from placement agents and fund managers and entrepreneurs, we can’t show up because we’re pretty good at sort of cracking that door open and you know, get, get, getting our, getting our way in at least for, for a quick hello, we could talk a little bit about, you know, how we’ve been successful doing that thankfully. But we need to show up with something that’s not very good. It’s got to be excellent. You know, our, and it creates a difficulty because if something’s excellent, sometimes they don’t need any help getting exposure with investors. They may already have a following with investors. So there’s some difficulty in how to, how to put that all together.

Seth Damski:
So sourcing becomes a bit of challenge, but it’s got to be really pretty tight and pretty diligence before we show up. So just sort of rephrasing the question with that in mind. You know, we’re, we’re never really taking, you know, we have to see a track record of success in other areas, a demonstration of integrity in other areas that diminishes the risk and really gives you a sense that okay. We’re not taking any risk on the people here.

Dana Robinson:
Right.

Seth Damski:
We have a team here that is capable, has had prior success, and now might be doing it in a slightly new arena where hopefully there’s a little margin of error because there’s a whole lot of room for profit and maybe a little bit of a room for, you know, a couple years of getting it right.

Dana Robinson:
Cool. Okay, so that’s great. You still, you know, you’re still focusing on fundamentally capable people. Dana Robinson here.

Dana Robinson:
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Dana Robinson:
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Dana Robinson:
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Dana Robinson:
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Dana Robinson:
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Dana Robinson:
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Dana Robinson:
You can get a free copy of the King’s Fly Swatter by going to danarobinson.com it all comes down to the.

Seth Damski:
People in every aspect, that aspect of our business. And that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s no surprise. I don’t think to you, we’re not tech investors, we’re not generally public market investors that are, you know, relying on, you know, sort of the market to take, to take you out. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s pretty fundamental, you know, cash flow oriented stuff.

Dana Robinson:
How long you been doing it?

Seth Damski:
So I started this business in 2006. I was in private wealth prior to that. And the way I got my start was I was at Merrill lynch, which is a great firm. And I could, could have seen myself sticking out a wonderful career at Merrill Lynch. I was off to a good start, thankfully. But I would find special opportunities outside of Merrill lynch which were too small for Merrill lynch. And there was nothing I could do with them. I couldn’t advise any clients on whether I thought it was a good idea or not, or if I thought these people running it were up to snuff or not.

Seth Damski:
I certainly couldn’t get paid. And it happened enough that I had seen really compelling opportunities and had nowhere to go that I started asking myself the question is, is Meryl sort of, you know, helping me or hindering, hindering me in doing what I want to do? And luckily there were some wise and wealthy folks who I had done good things for while at Merrill who were really eager to have me go find, you know, the special stuff that might be a little bit more niche and to really do the proper diligence to make a recommendation to move forward or not. So after enough times of not being able to, you know, really take advantage of an opportunity at Merrill, I finally left Merrill. And with the sponsorship of, of that same family office I had mentioned, we managed the money for a family based out of Baltimore. And we, I had the opportunity to go set up shop with, with some good support. And that was 18 years ago.

Dana Robinson:
Wow, good for you. And to what extent, I mean, this is a little bit of sideline, but I’m always curious about the sort of success of a venture of new business being correlated to the experience of the person. And it’s also, I’ll just say this, that I think the urban American myth is that you wake up with a big idea and you go, I’m going to start a business doing xyz. And you have no experience, no skills that you know, you’ve never done before. And you, you leave a job that you’ve learned a bunch of skills and you could do this other thing. And most entrepreneurs that do that fail and unfortunately shows like Shark Tank, I think perpetuate the myth. So you were Working a Merrill, you built relationships, you had some relationship capital there. You, you had opportunities come to you that weren’t Merrill ish.

Dana Robinson:
What, what were was what you were doing at Merrill well correlated to what you ended up needing in terms of the skill set when you, when you started Old City.

Seth Damski:
The answer, thankfully, is yes.

Dana Robinson:
Okay.

Seth Damski:
But I did have to backfill quite a bit once I sort of started running, you know, and sort of outran my supply line, so to speak.

Dana Robinson:
Let’s pause on that.

Dana Robinson:
What.

Dana Robinson:
What does that mean? Like the what? Whether, you know, you, you got into this and luckily you got good relationships, you’ve got the skills and the aptitude, you have the knowledge around the, the industry. You have some pipeline of deals that you’d all already been sort of like coming your way and a couple of benefactors. What did you find that was lacking that you had to scramble and as you say, backfill?

Seth Damski:
Well, ultimately, we’re in a very regulated business where compliance and regulatory concerns are pretty paramount. We had sort of bandaid that legally and compliantly, but it wasn’t robust to service more than me running around. So when I got to bringing on some colleagues to help build the platform, you know, we had to build our own broker dealer, for example, which is a FINRA entity that allows us to be, you know, oversee our, our own distribution activities and report back to FINRA that we’re not, you know, selling inappropriately risky investments or, you know, deceiving, God forbid, anybody along the way. The financial function, you know, we start growing, we start bringing on colleagues, we have spreadsheets that used to be just fine, and you realize that it’s just not something that’s going to scale. We have, thankfully, a lot of transactions, a lot of cash flow passing through the business, and a lot of folks who need to be paid correlated to those cash flows. And so implementing an erp, which was not at all our natural skill set, was something that we had to prioritize. We, we backfilled, you know, just in terms of adequacy and being able to just run the business. But then we realized that this was a specialty business that nobody has really built real well.

Dana Robinson:
Right?

Seth Damski:
So we went, you know, we sort of were building infrastructure defensively, just sort of catching up with our revenue success. And then we realized, well, hold on a second, there’s an opportunity here if we really do it right, because no one’s really doing it right. And I was explaining a little bit how our business is driven by having wonderful differentiated clients like the rail car manager and like others, which I’d love to tell you as much as you’re willing to hear about, and our primary source of revenue is raising capital for those managers internally. We have an office up on Fifth Avenue at 48th Street. So most of the capital that we raise is raised by our partners and colleagues who carry an Old City Investment Partners card. But we realize that just like we didn’t have the opportunity to latch on to a broker dealer that properly serviced, could properly service us, we had to create that ourselves. We realized that, hey, once we’re already creating it for ourselves, we can now offer those compliance, regulatory, but really much, much more in a way that’s just not present in the marketplace. The broker dealer that we started and that we’ve resourced really well was there to accommodate our own sales activities.

Seth Damski:
But what we found is it’s enabled us to empower independent placement folks who don’t want to run their own broker dealer and they don’t want to implement their own ERP and they don’t want to have their own chief counsel who can make sure that our contracts are watertight. We’re already doing that for ourselves. It’s very natural for us to be able to offer that out to others so they don’t have to build it themselves.

Dana Robinson:
That’s amazing. I mean, I think distinction.

Seth Damski:
There are some platforms that do some of the technical elements of that. Right. We’re the only platform where it’s really something that we built for ourselves. We didn’t build that to be a fee generating, you know, nickel and diming type of business where, you know, we can offer out a compliance and regulatory service and collect, you know, X hundred dollars a month in compliance fees and X fees and Y fees. We built it because we are in our, we’re dyed in the wool fundraisers and it makes a whole lot of difference. One, we don’t, we’re not, you know, sort of nickel and diming and two, our outlook is we can build a bigger pie and we can enable what we call cross selling or this syndicate approach whereby someone who comes to Old City needing a place to have their licenses overseen, needing a place that can help them with their legal work, but also having the option to have Old Cities Rolodex look at their deals or vice versa, as far as I know. Unique in that that happens quite frequently at Old City, that cross selling opportunity for independence to increase their Rolodex by virtue of our platform.

Dana Robinson:
Yeah, I mean that seems like why wouldn’t you, you know, the empower, the these you want as many of those that are competent as the platform can handle. And if you have mutual incentives constantly, then you have people not feeling protective of their turf. Right.

Seth Damski:
I think the answer to that because I’ve thought about it a lot, it doesn’t really like on paper this should be replicable. I think in real life if you’re going to build that type of platform, you’re not going to invest the type of money it takes to do it. Right. Unless it’s serving your own sales activity. Since we’ve built it to service our own sales activity, we get paid really well when we raise vast amounts of money. If you’re looking so, so we can justify a big spend on the infrastructure because we know we’ll get a bigger reward.

Dana Robinson:
Right.

Seth Damski:
If you’re looking at building a broker deal, a broker dealer platform based on fees that you, you’ll get once it’s built, it’s just, it takes a long time. You’re never going to get the ROI by spending enough to have it actually be robust. And that’s why we see a lot of high quality independent folks come our way who they, they may have a consulting business, they may have a landscape roll up business, but they also have a series 82, series 7 series whatever that they’d like to keep active and they’d like to keep as an opportunistic thing and we can, you know that that’s, that’s become a nice business for us in addition to our main business.

Dana Robinson:
Yeah, I mean that’s a very cool to been able to build something that you needed for your firm to function and have that become something that’s let you expand your footprint and empower a lot of other individual licensees. Let’s let me talk about your conference because you know, sounds like, it sounds like something I want to go to and you should come so sell me this conference.

Seth Damski:
Well, I have a philosophy which is if you can hit, hit your wagon to something, you know, amazing, that’s a, that’s a good way to do things as opposed to, you know, powering through on your own. It’s frankly the DNA of our business model. Right. We’re, we’re hitching our wagon to really talented, proven, high integrity, meticulous money managers and let them do the really hard work. And we work hard, were also associated with the smartest investors. So we have a little bit of a theme of magnifying our potency by hooking on to powerful folks on the investor side and the investment manager side. We were down in New Orleans Spending some time at the annual meeting for our manager, who’s based there, who owns barges and tugboats. So we were down there.

Seth Damski:
They had the good wisdom to host that meeting during Jazz Fest in the spring.

Dana Robinson:
Okay.

Seth Damski:
I had heard about Jazz Fest for decades. I’m always been into live music in my, you know, sort of during the back nine of my life here, I turned 50, you know, not that long ago. I’ve made the commitment to taking it and as much great live music as I can. So everything really came together. We found ourselves down in New Orleans. We found ourselves at Jazz Fest, which was every bit as amazing as I’d ever heard, and I’d heard it consistently for decades, that it’s really the greatest thing you can do if you even enjoy a little bit any type of live music, because it’s got everything. Dana, have you ever been to Jazz Fest in New Orleans?

Dana Robinson:
No, I have not.

Seth Damski:
Okay, take a look at our video. Alpha on the Delta is the name of our conference.

Dana Robinson:
Okay.

Seth Damski:
If you Google us, you. You’ll see some videos linked there, which will show you everything you sort of need to see in a quick synopsis of Jazz Fest. So we’ve built something very special. Ultimately, what it enables is a lot of the things I’ve been talking about thus far, which is relationships, relationships, relationships. If we can get quality time with investors and we can get quality time with investment managers and have them get to spend quality time together, not just sort of here and there, but over the course of several days, if not the weekend of Jazz Fest, good things are going to come of it. And that’s exactly what’s happened. The model is quite simple. Have a couple few days of serious business that ends sort of mid afternoon and leaves us time to have really good, quality, intimate time, taking in one of the great cities of this country at probably the best time to be there, which is Jazz Fest in New Orleans.

Dana Robinson:
And so who’s. Like what. Who gets to go if anyone’s listening and wants to know, and if I’m listening, I want to know whether I’m invited. Is it only managers that you vetted? Are you inviting sort of a brighter, broader swath of people who might be managing that you haven’t vetted yet? And. And then who’s. What are your investors? Is this a broader invite to investors and a broader network of potential investors?

Seth Damski:
Yeah, we’re really looking for good people. So if you go find Alpha on the Delta and there’s a button there to request to attend the conference, we’ll be in touch what makes our world go round, Dana, is talented entrepreneurs or investment managers. So we are rapidly progressing on our business plan to become the place to find high quality, undiscovered investments. So if you feel like you have something special to offer, what happens is we have about 25, maybe up to 30 investment managers or entrepreneurs and about 100 or so limited partners, investors who join us over the course of several days down in New Orleans. And we’re not a fit for everyone, but we encourage you to have a conversation with us so we can see if we can be helpful to you. If you’re an investment manager or an entrepreneur looking to create relationships with investors, it’s worth the conversation with us to see if it’s a match. And on the investor side, generally speaking, folks who want to be in the flow of things they’ve not necessarily seen before, ideas that sort of are not common across their desk. If you don’t have that sort of curiosity or if you don’t have the ability.

Seth Damski:
Some folks, Dana, are sitting at large institutions and it’s just not feasible for them to invest in anything but the biggest, bluest chip, you know, managers. We’re probably not the conference for you, but if you want to see, you know, the best array of investment managers and you know, we don’t charge our investment managers to come. So it’s really a canvas of what is going to be the most interesting considering where we’re at now. You know, with debt levels extraordinarily high and growing, a trillion dollars per quarter, and neither political candidate for president saying anything about serious, being serious about the debt, you know, we’re going to have some focused conversation on that. So if you’re intellectually curious and you know, you like to work hard and play hard, check out the website alpha on the delta and, and start a, start a dialogue with us, please.

Dana Robinson:
I love it. So you’re from the LP standpoint, if you’re an investor that is looking to invest in alternative assets, so, you know, this is the, the, you’re going to get an opportunity to meet with your team, but also to hang out with some potential target managers that, you know, can tell you what they’re up to and pique your interest and tell you something you might not have known as an investor in terms of understanding these, as you say, high quality, under, under.

Seth Damski:
Undiscovered, which is a little bit extreme sometimes folks are, you know, a little bit known. But yeah, so you don’t have to be, you know, completely off, off the map. But we have had some terrific, you Know managers who really were quite off the map and our conference helped get them great exposure to really thoughtful investors.

Dana Robinson:
Awesome.

Seth Damski:
Yeah. And we also are incorporating an element which is new to our. But we sort of study what other conferences are doing investor only conversations where you know, you can spend quality time with family offices if you’re a family office. Endowment funds if you’re an endowment funds if you’re an endowment fund. We have pension investors there so we’re going to have a strong opportunity to share notes with like minded peers in addition to spending time with interesting investment solution providers.

Dana Robinson:
Awesome. So then you have some LP only settings where LPs speak freely about what they’re, what they’re doing and learn from each other. That’s probably really beneficial because I know there are, you know, the LLP a. The big association right. Of LPs seems to be the only center of gravity to draw LPs together for kind of best practices. But the great idea to get them into someplace where they can informally hang out with other people whose jobs are allocation. Right.

Seth Damski:
Yeah. It’s really something that investors find compelling. We started what we call our Grand Marshals Council for the first time this year so that we could have investors tell us what’s really valuable to them. We got him some nice swag and we’ve had some really enriching conversations between that small group. It’s helping us plan an even better conference. But it’s also been a good example of what we’re going to build for everybody, which is investors speaking to one another. Hey, what’s you know, University of Pennsylvania thinking about for 2025 and you know, is that different or additive to what the family office down in Fort Worth might be thinking?

Dana Robinson:
Yeah, yeah, great, great. Way to cross pollinate a pretty diverse group because for you that it’s not like some of the, some of the allocation funds, you know, are focused on just, you know, pensions or just endowments. And you’re, you, you get an eclectic group of LPs together and you’ve got a way for them to benefit from each other’s knowledge that’s outside normal ecosystem.

Seth Damski:
And I have to say I’m just very appreciative to the Almighty and to all the folks who’ve, you know, helped me get to where I’m at, my wife included, because she’s sort of the secret force behind this conference. For me to be able to enjoy it so much, you know, I sort of can’t emphasize enough how lucky we are to hitch our wagon to the greatest thing that I’ve ever seen on this great green earth, which is Jazz Fest in New Orleans.

Dana Robinson:
I love it. Well, as we wrap things up, Seth, did I miss anything? You know, I interrupted you four or five times. Is there anything that I failed to bring out in this, in our discussion that you were itching to talk about?

Seth Damski:
I think we covered a lot and you know, I’m I can’t wait to learn. I was introduced to your to your podcast through this opportunity and I started checking out a couple of the topics and I can’t wait to dig in because there’s a lot there. And thanks for that opportunity to learn with you.

Dana Robinson:
Absolutely. My pleasure. And happy to have other people you know on the show. Send your send potential guests and whether they’re LPs or investment managers or anybody in the profession, love to love to get them on teaching me and any listener what what we’re doing here in the in the world of private equity. Seth, just to reiterate, your website for the conference is alpha on the delta.com how else are you active on LinkedIn or any place else people can connect with you?

Seth Damski:
You can find me on LinkedIn. Alpha on the Delta would be a Google search. It’s New Orleans.OldCityCapital.com is the actual conference URL, but we pop right up on Google Alpha on the Delta or check us out Old City investment partners on LinkedIn. We’ll link to it as well.

Dana Robinson:
Awesome. Seth, thanks for coming on the podcast. Everybody else out there, don’t forget, send me an email hello@danarobinson.com and let me know if you have any questions that I can bring to my guests.

Seth Damski:
Have a great weekend.

Dana Robinson:
Have a great weekend.

Seth Damski:
Awesome. And let’s be in touch on the landscaping thing. I might have some leads for you there.

Dana Robinson:
Thanks for joining me on this episode of the Exit Plan podcast. I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to hit me up with questions or comments by emailing me at hello@danarobinson.com or leave comments and questions by calling 858-252-7785, call 858-252-7785 and leave a message.